AMAZING MISS A AND WHY WE SHOULD CARE ABOUT HER, THE

McGill Journal of Education, Fall 2003 by Fallon, Daniel

I know that my remarks are supposed to provide a summary, of sorts, of your activities today. I deduce also that good taste requires that I not work you too hard. So I hope you'll extend to me your confidence that I do understand the rules, even as I tell you now that what I'm going to do is conduct an academic seminar. I'm going to describe a major research study in a leading research journal. We can draw several lessons from this exercise, and there will be time for you to ask questions when we are done. Let me proceed by describing the article.

As presidents of independent-sector colleges you'll appreciate that the senior author of the article came from a background of poverty and persevered. he obtained a teaching certificate at an independent-sector junior college, and later earned his B.A. degree during the evenings and summers at an independent-sector four-year comprehensive institution, while serving as a full-time teacher in an elementary school. It was obviously in these places that he learned the problem-solving skills that proved valuable to him later in life. Ultimately he earned a doctorate at Harvard, and then took up a faculty appointment at McGiIl University where he later became Vice-Principal (Academic), serving in that position for nine years. Had he been at an American university, his title would likely have been Provost and Academic Vice President. Being blessed with high intelligence, he chose then not to pursue a presidency, but to return to the faculty, where he continued his research and teaching.

Professor Eigil Pedersen is the senior author of the lead article in the Harvard Educational Review from the issue of February 1978. he had already been Vice-Principal for six years at the time the article appeared, so it is all the more remarkable for having been completed while the author was laden with heavy administrative responsibility. Although the editors of the journal saw the obvious significance of the study, it was nonetheless largely ignored because it ran against the prevailing orthodoxy of the time. A few discerning scholars, however, were impressed with the elegance of its writing and the exceptional genius of its scholarship. Therefore, since its appearance it has been assigned occasionally in graduate seminars along with other articles, which is how I found it last year. Current cutting-edge research has now validated Pedersen's essential findings, making his contribution of high importance today, more than 23 years after its publication.

Pedersen and his co-authors focus on a particular elementary school as the subject of their research. Let me read you the description of the school as it appears in the article.

"Our research setting, the Ray School (a fictitious name), was located in a large northeastern city in North America. Situated in one of the poorest areas of the city, the fifty-year old building that housed its students stood out like a fortress in the streets. During the period when the subjects attended Ray, freight terminals of a large railway, as well as a steel-fabrication plant, were located in its immediate neighborhood, and most of the pupils had to cross at least one major traffic artery to get to the school. Across the street from the front entrance, the buildings of a brothel, thinly disguised as residences, blocked the view of a junkyard. Crowded tenement houses were interspersed with an automobile repair shop, a dry-cleaning plant, and an armature-wiring factory. The asphalt schoolyard was enclosed by a chain-link fence and the ground-floor windows were protected with vertical iron bars."

Now, you might ask how a researcher could come up with such a vivid and arresting description. It turns out that Professor Pedersen was himself a pupil in that school. As he points out, the research is unusual in many ways, not the least of which is that the senior author had a relationship with the setting since the age of four.

The research was conducted on subjects who were pupils in the school at various times over a 25-year period, which I've deduced began some time in the late 1930's. Although Ray School was located in Canada, where there was no policy of "separate but equal" segregation, most Montrealers of African ancestry lived in its district; hence, in Ray School, about one third of the 500 pupils there were African-Canadians. The school's reputation was as the most difficult school among the 80 elementary English-language schools in Montreal. Group IQ tests were administered to all schools in the system in the third and sixth grades, and year after year, Ray School students consistently had the lowest mean IQ in the city. Physical discipline was a common pedagogical tool, resulting in about 500 strappings of pupils on average each year. Less than 50% of the pupils on average who graduated from the Ray School went on to complete the first year of high school, then 8th grade in Montreal, and less than 10% of the pupils who attended Ray actually graduated from high school. As you might imagine, few teachers wanted to work at the Ray school and the turnover among the teaching staff was high. Of course, there were also some teachers who had settled in to serve out their careers there.